Context

Agatha Christie was born Agatha
Mary Clarissa Miller on September 5, 1890,
in Torquay, England. In 1914 she
married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying
Corps. They had a daughter, Rosalind, and divorced in 1928.
By that time, Christie had begun writing mystery stories, initially
in response to a dare from her sister. Her first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and
featured the debut of one of her most famous characters, the Belgian
sleuth Hercule Poirot. Christie would go on to become the world’s
best-selling writer of mystery novels.

By the time Christie began writing, the mystery novel
was a well-established genre with definite rules. Edgar Allan Poe
pioneered the mystery genre in his short story “Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” and writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle carried on the
tradition Poe began. In traditional mysteries like Poe’s and Doyle’s,
the story is told from the perspective of a detective-protagonist
(or a friend of the detective, like Sherlock Holmes’s companion,
Dr. Watson) as he or she examines clues and pursues a killer. At
the end of the novel, the detective unmasks the murderer and sums
up the case, explaining the crime and clearing up mysterious events.
As the story unfolds, the reader gets access to exactly the same
information as the detective, which makes the mystery novel a kind
of game in which the reader has a chance to solve the case for him-
or herself.

Fairly early in her career, in 1926,
Christie came under fire for writing an “unfair” mystery novel.
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the killer turns
out to be the narrator, and many readers and critics felt that this
was too deceptive a plot twist. Christie was unapologetic, however,
and today The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered
a masterpiece of the detective genre.

And Then There Were None, written in 1939,
breaks more rules of the mystery genre. No detective solves the
case, the murderer escapes from the law’s grasp, and the plot construction
makes guessing the killer’s identity nearly impossible. Despite
this rule-breaking, or perhaps because of it, And Then There
Were None ranks as one of Christie’s most popular and critically
acclaimed novels. It was made into a stage play, and several film
versions have been produced, the most celebrated of which is the 1945 version
starring Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston.

In all, Christie produced eighty novels and short-story
collections, most of them featuring either Poirot or her other famous sleuth,
the elderly spinster Miss Marple. She also wrote four works of nonfiction
and fourteen plays, including The Mousetrap, the longest-running
play in history. Eventually, Christie married an archaeologist named
Sir Max Mallowan, whose trips to the Middle East provided the setting
for a number of her novels. In 1971, Queen
Elizabeth II awarded Christie the title of Dame Commander of the
British Empire. Christie died in Oxfordshire, England, on January 12, 1976.